The Murder Room (40 page)

Weinstein stood, heavyset and balding, his face worn with the curse of a photographic memory. He was thirty years old again, passing through the tree line to the field off Susquehanna Road; he was kicking his rubber boots through the muck and wet underbrush. “I saw all this garbage,” he said, “and a young white boy whose hair was chopped. It was a sad, heartbreaking thing to see. It was a dump. This was homicide.”

Weinstein said the case had been taken away from him, a patrolman, and assigned to detectives forty years ago. He’d stubbornly conducted his own investigation, and through a confidential informant found a local man who had photos of himself with a young blond boy on his lap and “an Indian blanket spread out.” He purchased the photos. He interviewed the man, who was “very cooperative” but “extremely nervous,” in a restaurant. The man “started to get shaky.” He had just agreed to go to the Homicide Unit for questioning when a superior officer saw Weinstein in the restaurant and ordered him to leave, ending his role in the investigation. Weinstein said he welcomed a second chance he never thought he’d have.

Kelly dreamed of solving the case as the crowning moment of his career, and in many ways his life. McGillen’s wife was proud of his efforts to help bring Marie Noe to justice and now perhaps helping to resolve the Boy in the Box murder. She was dying of cancer, and she prayed she would see him triumph in the cases.

Bender said he had a vision that the boy had been dressed as a girl. His caretakers had grown his hair out long and chopped it to conceal his identity just before killing him. Walter snorted and others laughed.

“Keep your day job, Frank,” Walter reminded him, his favorite dismissal of his creative partner.

Fleisher longed to give the boy a decent burial. “This case is solvable,” he said. Even if the killer or killers were dead, he said, their purpose would be to restore to the boy the dignity of his name, and avenge him with their only remaining weapon, the truth. They could bring the killer “to reckoning if not to justice.”

“Bah!” Walter glared at Fleisher, a look he usually reserved for people who peddle Bibles door-to-door. The thin man had grown weary of the sentimentality in the air. He openly mocked the consensus that had initially started with Bristow that the boy had been accidentally killed by loving caretakers who fled with broken hearts, unable to afford a decent burial. In 1957, police had seen it as a murder, but over time, at Bristow’s urging, they’d publicly said it was an accident.

The child, Walter thought, was sacrificed to the most malevolent murdering personality of all, and to preserve their own innocence the cops had made a fetish of his lost childhood, keeping him an eternal child as he moldered forty-one years in the grave. The killer represented a force so vile the cops couldn’t face the truth. Without truth, how could they find the killer?

They had waited forty-one years for the truth, and in fact now seemed energetically devoted to the long martyrdom of failure; the mystery gave them such purpose, and the truth admitted none of the romance of beach toys and baseball gloves.

“It’s hard to find something,” Walter sniffed later, “when you don’t know what you’re looking for.” The horror behind his cool, dry words seemed not to penetrate the others.

The fact was that after forty-one years of continuous investigation, thousands of police interviews across thirty states, and thousands of pages or pieces of so-called evidence, they still had nothing to go on. Never in American detective history, outside the Lindbergh kidnapping, had so much effort been expended on a child murder case to produce so little, he thought.

“We don’t have much,” Walter reasoned. “But I don’t need much.” The marks on the body told a plain and incontrovertible story, one the others were loath to hear.

O
n a Wednesday evening in late March 1998, an unmarked black Ford Explorer carrying Philadelphia police sergeant Larry Nodiff and two of his detectives from the Special Investigations Unit parked on a narrow street in the old working-class river ward of Kensington. The murky industrial air along the river was gray with twilight. A crescent moon, nearly black, hung above the lane of small brick row houses.

Sergeant Nodiff knocked on the door of a row home that looked like all the others. Nodiff looked up at darkened windows. His partner Steve Vivarina chewed his coffee stirrer. The day before, Stephen Fried’s investigative story on Marie Noe’s long-forgotten tragedy, “Cradle to Grave,” was published in
Philadelphia
magazine, and as the magazine hit the streets the city was abuzz with it. Sergeant Nodiff, who had read an advance copy, decided it was time to pay Marie and Arthur Noe a visit about the deaths of their eight babies. It was a historian’s task as well as police work. The babies had died across nineteen years, from the Truman administration to LBJ. The police had not questioned the Noes about the deaths in thirty years. Now a few minutes passed.

Presently the thin, hard face of Arthur Noe, seventy-six years old, filled a crack in the door. Behind him loomed the larger frame of his wife, Marie, sixty-nine. Sergeant Nodiff showed his badge and asked if they would come to headquarters for questioning. The Noes had the right to refuse but they said yes, they’d just be a few minutes. They had just finished dinner, and needed to take care of their cats and dogs.

“Will you put Asshole downstairs?” Arthur called to his wife. Asshole, he explained to the cops, was one of their cats. Marie tended to the cat, then they put on light jackets and slowly climbed into the police van. They had been together most of their lives. Marie was diabetic, and not well. Arthur was trembling. Theirs was an unbreakable bond built, as many are, on things understood, things not said.

Marie and Arthur were taken to separate interrogation rooms in the Roundhouse, the cement police headquarters downtown. In Interrogation Room C, Arthur, a chain-smoker, was downcast and nervous. A sharp, quick-talking man, he had worked in Kensington’s textile factories for years. He had served as a Democratic committeeman in the river ward and as an assistant to a city councilman. He hated to see Marie dragged through the tragedies again. Losing all those children between 1949 and 1968 had been like “taking away half her life.” As he had told a reporter, “It may be news to you. It’s suffering to us.” Detective Jack McDermott quickly realized that Arthur had nothing new to tell them, and offered him a ride home. Arthur said he’d prefer to wait for his wife.

As night came, Arthur lit a cigarette and sat watching the television on the battered filing cabinets lining the homicide division. Marie was in Interrogation Room D with Sergeant Nodiff and Detective Vivarina. Arthur worried about his wife’s health, looked at his watch, smoking all through the night. As the sky lightened, he was still waiting.

At five o’clock in the morning, Marie hobbled out of the interrogation room, her careworn face collapsed in fatigue and relief. It had been eleven hours with the detectives. Arthur came and touched her gently, his eyes lingering in concern. Marie held her husband’s eyes and her secrets. Even when she’d tried to tell the truth, Arthur always interrupted her. Among the couple’s many unspoken routines during the past forty years together, this was the most important. It was as if he didn’t want to know.

Sergeant Nodiff, the city’s lead cold-case detective and a member of the Vidocq Society, was one of the department’s sharpest interrogators. Detective Vivarina could amiably keep anybody talking. So they’d talked and talked with Marie all night. Then before dawn, Sergeant Nodiff confided years later to detectives at an out-of-town conference, one of the strangest things in his career happened to him. He blushed and said, “You just won’t believe it,” as he told it. Marie, sitting right next to the sergeant, reached out and put her wrinkled hand on the dark trousers covering his leg. Slowly, as she gently stroked the sergeant’s inner thigh, the unspoken words of decades came tumbling out.

She confessed.

She had smothered her babies with a pillow, she said. She and Arthur had ten children. One was stillborn. Another died in the hospital six hours after birth. The remaining eight went home in excellent health. None of them lived longer than fifteen months. Marie admitted to killing them all. She waited until Arthur was out of the house, a pattern she repeated each time. She hid all the murders from her husband and relatives. Marie was alone with the babies in the house.

She could remember the deaths of only four of her children in detail. They were the first three and the fifth. The murders of Richard Allen Noe, 1949; Elizabeth Mary Noe, 1951; Jacqueline Noe, 1952; and Constance Noe, 1958, were etched in her mind. She remembered Richard, her firstborn, very clearly. He was born March 7, 1949, a healthy seven pounds, eleven ounces. “He was always crying. He couldn’t tell me what was bothering him. He just kept crying. . . .”

“The day that he died,” Marie said, she was getting Richard ready for bed. “I bathed him and put him in nightclothes and I was going to put him down for the night. I put him on his belly instead of his back in his bassinet, and there was a pillow under his face, he was lying facedown. Then I took my hand and pressed his face down into the pillow until he stopped moving.” Richard Noe was thirty-one days old. His cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but no autopsy was performed. It was accepted medical wisdom in the 1950s that a mother would not kill her children.

Two years later, in 1951, alone in the house with Elizabeth Mary, Marie picked up and held her pink, squirming, squalling daughter, a healthy and vigorous five months old. She put Elizabeth Mary in the bassinet. “I put her on her back, and then I took a pillow from the bed and put the pillow over her face and suffocated her.” Elizabeth was memorable because “she was fussing. Elizabeth was a lot stronger than Richard was, and she was fighting when the pillow was over her face. I held the pillow over her face until she stopped moving.”

A year later, in 1952, Jacqueline Noe died in infancy. Marie admitted to killing her second daughter the same way she did her first son and daughter, but couldn’t remember any details.

As she told the story, she called each baby “it.” Detectives kept insisting she call the children by name.

Six years later, in 1958, Constance Noe was born at St. Luke’s Hospital. Abraham Perlman, a pediatrician who treated the baby, was suspicious because Constance’s four older siblings had all died. The pediatrician noticed a pattern to the deaths, he told police years later. Marie Noe was always home alone with the child. In each case, she took the infant to a hospital or called a neighbor to help her, saying, “Something’s wrong with the baby.” The children were all dead on arrival. Noe’s explanation was always that the baby had been “gasping for breath and turning blue.” It was medical orthodoxy then that children could suddenly stop breathing, and the fatal syndrome might be a defect that ran in families, so Dr. Perlman performed extensive tests on Constance to find any possible weakness. All the tests came back normal. Constance was a robustly healthy baby girl.

As mother and child left the hospital, Dr. Perlman told Marie that Constance was a beautiful child. Her mother replied, “She’s not going to live . . . just like the others.”

One month later, Constance, a healthy, thriving baby girl, was having difficulty sitting in a chair. “I was trying to train her on how to sit up in the chair,” Marie said. “I don’t know why, but then I took a pillow and laid her down on the chair, and I suffocated her.”

The autopsy of Constance was performed by pathologist Marie Valdes-Dapena at the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Dr. Valdes-Dapena, who would later become a recognized authority on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), was baffled. Pathologists were mystified by “crib death,” she said. The scientific study of infant death was just beginning, and no one had coined the term “SIDS.” Doctors had no idea why approximately 7,000 babies a year simply stopped breathing. Even years later, when doctors suspected many of those deaths to be infanticide, it was extraordinarily difficult for a pathologist to distinguish a baby who died of SIDS from one who was suffocated.

Marie Noe had discovered the perfect murder.

Marie did not cry during the confession. She said calmly that she killed baby Arthur Jr. in 1955, but couldn’t remember how. Arthur Jr. was born nine months to the day after Marie said she was raped by a stranger and left bound with her husband’s ties in the bedroom closet. Her last three children were featured in the
Life
story, a compassionate tale of the mother who lost all her babies—Mary Lee, born in 1962, Catherine Ellen in 1964, and the last born, Arthur Joseph. The ninth child, Catherine Ellen, lived the longest—one year, two months, and twenty-two days. She died on February 25, 1966, of undetermined cause. The last born, Arthur Joseph, died on January 2, 1968, at the age of five months. At the time, Marie told police that Arthur Joseph just turned blue and stopped breathing. An autopsy was performed, but no determination was made on the manner of death. Marie now confessed to killing all three babies born in the 1960s, but couldn’t recall details.

As the sun came up, the confession was typed up. Marie read it over and signed it. She leaned back, her face flushed with relief. She told detectives she always hoped police would find out. “I knew what I was doing was very wrong,” she said. She stood slowly to leave Interrogation Room D. Suddenly, she turned to face Nodiff and Vivarina. Her face was creased in concern, her voice a whisper: “Don’t tell my husband what I told you.”

Sergeant Nodiff and detective Vivarina looked at each other. An old lady who would barely walk without assistance had killed more people than David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz or the Boston Strangler. They had a detailed confession of eight murders—infanticide, perhaps the most taboo of human crimes. In God’s name, why? And now what could they do with it?